I wanted to introduce to you the first musical director being featured at our open mic, the immensely talented Dan Furman! Dan Furman hails from Old Hickory, Tennessee (just outside of Nashville). He began playing piano and composing music at an early age and went on to study composition and jazz piano at Oberlin Conservatory. After moving to New York in 2003 to play jazz, Dan began writing for music theater as well. He spent 4 years in the BMI Lehman Engels Musical Theater Workshop and his musical, “RIP!,” (now “Impossible But True”), was featured in the 2011 Midtown International Theatre Festival. Dan wrote the theme song for the Big Apple Circus 2010-11 show, “Dance On!” His collaboration with bookwriter Anita Gonzalez, “Ybor City,” was given a staged reading at the Lee Strasberg Institute in Manhattan in the summer of 2015, and later a studio production at the University of Michigan in early 2017. Dan is currently writing book, music and lyrics for “The Proust Virus," a musical about video game characters who come to life. He lives in Brooklyn and appears frequently as a jazz pianist at the off-off-Broadway show Sleep No More, as well as with the Dan Furman Trio.
Here are some questions of interest I asked Dan:
1) Can you share with us an interesting fact that most people don’t know about you?
I once ran for Senate in Washington DC as a socialist candidate. At the time, I worked at a mattress factory…or a sausage plant—don’t remember which.
2) Through the years, you've worked with lots of artists. Do you have a memorable, interesting story you'd like to share?
I worked on a large ocean liner that traversed the Arctic, playing with a wonderful band. Midway through the journey, we struck an iceberg and the ship began to sink. We all decided to keep playing to the very end. All the musicians di— oh wait, that must be someone else’s story.
3) What motivates your creativity? Name three things that never fails to put a smile on your face!
Writing music is probably my favorite thing to do, at least when it goes well. I have been a jazz composer and pianist for many years, but more recently
I’ve been devoting a lot of time to writing musicals. I like:
1. elephants
2. reading Proust
3. a good bottle of red wine
4) Share with us what you have in the pipeline for us to be on the lookout for!
I just completed the first public reading of my new musical: “The Proust Virus.” It is about video game characters
who come to life when “In Search of Lost Time” by Proust is uploaded into their game.
I am also developing “Ybor City” with book writer Anita Gonzalez, which is about workers in a cigar factory in Florida in 1918 who come together across
racial divisions to launch a strike. I hope to have new readings or workshops of one or both shows this coming fall.
Over the next few months, I will be playing shows with singers Martin McQuade, Lynn Kearney and Sonja Stuart, Scot Albertson, and Arturo Padilla.
The Dan Furman Jazz Duo will be appearing at Cleopatra’s Needle on July 6 and September 14.
Join me in welcoming Dan and mark your calendars for the upcoming performances by the Dan Furman Jazz Duo!